


The Throne of Solomon

by Snowgrouse



Category: Thief of Bagdad (1940), كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة | Kitaab 'alf layla wa-layla | One Thousand and One Nights
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Androgynous male character, Barmakids, Dark Het, F/M, Fate & Destiny, Fluff, Heroine/Villain, Historical, Islam, Islamic scripture and lore, King Solomon - Freeform, Magic, Magic-Users, Meant To Be, Middle Ages, Muslim characters, Mythology - Freeform, Persia, Romance, Short, Supernatural romance, Telepathy, The Golden Age of Islam, The Queen of Sheba, The Thousand And One Nights - Freeform, The Throne of Solomon, Vignette, costume porn, courting, middle eastern mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-23
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2019-03-08 06:31:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13452510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snowgrouse/pseuds/Snowgrouse
Summary: Jaffar, son of Yahya of the Barmakids has arrived in Basra, come to ask for the Princess's hand.At first, Sultan Mahmoud is overjoyed, but soon puzzled, perplexed. For the new Caliph requests a most intimate audience with his prospective bride, one with a most curious requirement: that he be allowed to gaze upon her--the woman no man has seen!--unveiled, and that he might inspecther headin particular for himself."But what for?" The Sultan sputters. "She is not some slave girl, to be examined by all who would purchase her! Is not seeing her face enough?""I believe," Jaffar states in all seriousness, "that you have done well to keep her from all eyes. For my astrologer tells me a very special child was born this hour seventeen years ago. 'A child in whom meet the moon and the sun...?'"The Sultan's eyes fly wide; he shakes his head, blubbering. "Nobody knows that. Nobody! Why, I had her swaddled, the astrologer beheaded, and the midwife--"Jaffar but tilts his head. "I have astrologers of my own, and means of seeing past walls. Seventeen years have I waited, until such a conjunction was upon us again. Today, I was told, was the most auspicious time for me to seek her as bride."





	The Throne of Solomon

**Author's Note:**

> Note that the type of throne being talked about here is one of the platform-like models known in the Islamic world, not like a Western throne that only seats one person. Have a look at these Persian thrones to get an idea of the kind of platform we're talking about:
> 
>  
> 
> [The Marble Throne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Throne)
> 
>  
> 
> [The Sun Throne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Throne)

Jaffar, son of Yahya of the Barmakids has arrived in Basra, come to ask for the Princess's hand. 

At first, Sultan Mahmoud is overjoyed, but soon puzzled, perplexed. For the new Caliph requests a most intimate audience with his prospective bride, one with a most curious requirement: that he be allowed to gaze upon her--the woman no man has seen!--unveiled, and that he might inspect _her head_ in particular for himself. 

"But what for?" The Sultan sputters. "She is not some slave girl, to be examined by all who would purchase her! Is not seeing her face enough?"

"I believe," Jaffar states in all seriousness, "that you have done well to keep your daughter from all eyes. For my astrologer tells me a very special child was born this hour seventeen years ago. _A child in whom meet the moon and the sun...?"_

The Sultan's eyes fly wide and he shakes his head, blubbering. "Nobody knows that. Nobody! Why, I had her swaddled, the astrologer beheaded, and the midwife--"

Jaffar but tilts his head, like a cat watching birds. "I have astrologers of my own, and means of seeing past walls. Seventeen years have I waited, until such a conjunction," and he points up at the sky, "was upon us again. Today, I was told, was the most auspicious time for me to seek her as bride," he says, now boring his gaze into the Sultan with such fury that he blanches. "A seventeen-year-old is an old maid, and a man such as myself almost beyond marriageable age. Either we act now, or you will have to say goodbye to your bloodline. Unless..."

"Unless?"

"Unless you join it with that of the Barmakids, the most prestigious bloodline of the known world," Jaffar says and clasps the pommel of his sword. "After yours, of course, seeing as you are the Prophet's--peace be upon him--descendants. Think of it! The holiness of the Messenger's clan mixing with the genius of of the Barmakids! Thus, surely, my small request for this inspection--performed in absolute secrecy and privacy, without anyone having to know, without the slightest of smears upon your daughter's reputation--is not too much to ask, if the children born from such a union are likely to become kings as great as Alexander himself?"

The Sultan drums his thighs and chews upon his beard. "All right, all right. I will have to ask the women, however," he says with a note of warning, implying this will not be easy. "Zuleikha--"

"Her mother?"

"Always had a mind of her own, Zuleikha, and Yassamin's inherited her temper--"

Jaffar hands him a signet ring with a gold-flecked blue stone embedded into it. "Flash them this."

The Sultan looks at the sigil within the blue stone: a moon embracing a sun. "Good Lord!"

"Quite."

***

As the Sultan brings Yassamin and her mother the news, they are scandalised: Zuleikha gasps as she sees the ring, covering her mouth with her hand.

"What on earth is the matter with you, mother?!" Yassamin cries as Zuleikha falls upon her, starting to frantically comb Yassamin's thick black curls with her fingers, as if looking for something.

Once her father tells her of the Barmakid's request--that in the year so-and-so, in the city of so-and-so, a very special, a very blessed daughter was supposed to have been born to the ruler of that land--and that were this girl not married to the right man, great calamity would ensue. But that the only way the Barmakid could ascertain that Yassamin was indeed this special maiden would be to inspect her bare-faced--and bare-headed.

"Yes, and the great calamity will fall upon _you,_ father mine, if you destroy my reputation because of a madman and a fool! I have heard of the Barmakids, all of them unbeliever dogs and witches--this but proves it!" She clings to her father's lapels. "Father, for seventeen years you have allowed no man to lay his eyes upon me, and now you would allow this... this _beast_ to gaze upon me unveiled, like a slave girl, a whore?!"

"But, my child..." the Sultan pets her hair. "It's all right. Your mother and I will stand right here beside you as he does it, and nobody will know. He is a good man, a wise man, if odd, and you know about the riches of the Barmakids--"

"No!" Yassamin cries. "I am not like some mare to be inspected at a market!"

"Daughter," Zuleikha says, still holding the ring, still playing with Yassamin's hair. "He is no ordinary man. God has His hand in this, I know it: we would be fools not to listen to what He is trying to tell us. This is something your father and I have puzzled over all your life, a secret we could not even tell you yourself about."

"What secret?" Yassamin raises her tear-streaked face from her father's brocades. 

Zuleikha plucks the golden flowers from Yassamin's hair, undoing the pins that hold her coiffure in place. "Come. We shall pick out for you the loosest, most heavily embroidered robe, so that you will be as decent as possible."

***

And thus, that night, despite her protestations, Yassamin now stands in the centre of a small room while Jaffar--after having been formally introduced to her through elaborate rituals--walks around her with a lantern in his hand, taking her in with her gaze. The Sultan and Queen Zuleikha stand on either side of the two, Zuleikha in particular looking ready to plunge a dagger into Jaffar should he break one hair on Yassamin's head. 

Yassamin herself is dressed in three sets of heavily embroidered, beaded khilat robes--so heavy and loose the shape of her body cannot be seen from underneath them; she looks less like a woman and more like a gem-encrusted bell. She is furious with Jaffar's insolence, digging her nails into her palms. Even if he is--for reasons of decency--using a thin cane to lift her hair from her face, she feels insulted not only by the examination but his calm, infuriating smile.

"Would you like to look at my teeth next?!" she fumes.

"Your teeth are as pearls, my lady," Jaffar says, "but they are not what I am looking for at this juncture. I think the clue I seek is just above the nape of your neck, just above the hairline..." he leans in. "May I?" 

"If you must," she sighs and drops her chin, trying to let him not see how much she is shivering. For long moments, now, he has been lifting strands of her hair with the cane, its sharp tip scraping her skin here and there: she has goosebumps all over her body, and her palms are sweating. 

But there it is indeed, the birthmark Jaffar has been looking for: clearly etched onto the scalp, a symbol of the sun and the moon together. Exactly as on the ring: Jaffar gestures for Zuleikha to compare the two, and she is so shocked that Mahmoud has to hold her lest she fall over in a faint.

Jaffar tucks the cane into his belt and faces Yassamin, his smile now so glad she does not know what to think. "You are of both Arab and Persian descent, are you not, my child?"

" _Pure_ Arab, I'll have you know!" she lifts her chin. "There's not a drop of blood in my veins that is not of the Prophet's--peace be upon him--clan."

"Then, my child, it is written that you should be Persia's bride: upon your scalp, God has impressed the symbols of Arabia and Persia together. The purestmost, piousmost, boldestmost qualities of your race have met in you, and it is time they were joined with their Persian equivalents. You, my lady, are as the Mother of All Believers come back to raise her nation to glory, ready to bestow unto your children guardianship over the circumference of the Earth."

"You blaspheme," she says quietly, casting down her eyes at being so compared to the women of the Prophet's immediate family. "I am not that great."

"Yet you are. I suppose you would think I was boasting again when I told you of my family--but I need not. I take it that you know all there is to know about the House of Barmak."

 _Vile pagan dogs,_ she mutters inside. Yet, out loud, she says nothing--even the lowliest peasant slave knows of the Barmakids' glories, them having been the very family through whose assistance the Arabs had risen to govern the whole Persian empire. 

While Jaffar's father and mother had advised and pacified the most tyrannical of caliphs, diluting even al-Hadi's and al-Rashid's insanities, Jaffar and his brothers had gone to the provinces to do the same. With their firm but fair guidance and their legendary generosity, they had quashed the most violent of rebellions and brought happiness and prosperity to all corners of the empire from the Sindh to the Nile. The peoples of the empire had soon learned that the Barmakids were on their side, making sure all of the Caliphs' subjects--regardless of race or class, or even faith--were treated well. 

And it was not exactly a secret that most people believed--or, rather, _knew_ \--that it was the Barmakids who were the true rulers of the empire. The conquering Arabs had known nothing of the statesmanship, the elaborate bureaucracies, even the irrigation systems that were necessary to keep an empire as vast as this running; these, and all the sciences--especially those of medicine, engineering and astronomy--the Barmakids had been the keepers of for centuries. 

In short, the Barmakids _were_ Persia, its civilisation: in comparison, the Arabs were little more than barbarians, knowledgeable only in the matters of horses, poetry and warfare.

This, Yassamin is acutely aware of, yet holds her silence still. She refuses to think of herself as some chosen prophetess, but she does not wish to lower herself to the status of some barbarian concubine to a Persian lord either. Which one of these two does Jaffar even think of her as? Inspecting her like a slave, yet comparing her to Aisha herself? Oh, she is being made a fool of and no mistake. 

When Yassamin doesn't speak, her father, wringing his hands in both excitement and nervousness, breaks the silence with an awkward, forced laugh. "It is a good match, my child; a most perfect match. Such a match the world has not seen since the--"

It is then that the air shimmers behind Yassamin, as if a burst of precious, iridescent jewels. 

Her parents gasp, her father outright falling onto his rump in shock; Jaffar but smirks quietly and lowers his hand, snatching his fingers into a fist. 

A brief grind of stone against stone rings through the room and is, then, gone.

Now, Yassamin turns to look: and before her eyes, at the back of the room, sits a throne of green emerald.

"Solomon!" Zuleikha exclaims, looking at Jaffar, then her husband and daughter. Mahmoud frowns a little, but immediately Yassamin understands what her mother means, and turns to look at Jaffar in a mixture of anger and awe. 

"But a sleight-of-hand trick! You fiend!" she cries at Jaffar, her voice high. "Mother, do you not see? This... this _conjuror_ dares compare himself with King Solomon! Father, any lesser man you would already have beheaded for blasphemy!"

Yet her father but sits there and stares, murmuring a holy verse: "These are God's signs to those who believe..."

_And Solomon asked Bilqis if she recognised the throne. She said "it is indeed the same," and realising the Source Solomon's powers had come from, she bent down her head and submitted to the true God._

"No, no, no--no!" Yassamin cries, covering her face with her hands so that the mirage cannot harm her. "He is trying to trick you; this is entirely the _opposite_ of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba! It was _she_ who ceased to worship the sun, yet here you would marry me, a believer, to the real sun-worshipper!"

Her mother is not listening to her; she but strokes the emerald bed of the throne with tears in her eyes, whispering quiet prayers. "It is real, my daughter."

"See for yourself," Jaffar says, soft, gesturing towards the throne, and Yassamin feels faint: for Jaffar's face is glowing like the sun, the paleness of his eyes the high and vertignious zenith of the midday sky. "It is yours. The throne of the Caliphate, upon which I sit: yet there is room upon it for another. More often--as you know--it is the Grand Vizier's seat, or that of a great poet; rarely that of a queen. But as in you, noble Yassamin of Basra, both wisdom and beauty combine in a degree unseen since Bilqis herself, it would be a crime against God to install upon it anyone except your good self."

Yassamin sobs, yet strangles that sob in her throat and swallows it, just as she swallows those tears she is now blinking away from her eyes. 

She stares at the throne, the luminous green of it, the green of life, of magic, of Paradise.

Or the green of poison, of illness, of death. 

"Do I have a choice?" she asks, the sigil of the sun upon the nape of her neck now burning her skin, the moon beside it as cold as ice. 

Her parents look mortified, incomprehending, surely this close to beating her for bringing such shame upon her family with her insolence. 

Yet despite them, she looks at Jaffar once more: at his tall, still, statuelike figure, the black and blue of whose robes now seem to swallow her as the night swallows the day's light. _How can a man be both the sun and the night at the same time?_

 _Yes,_ his voice answers deep inside of her mind, playful, soft: _now all he needs is but his moon, for his night and day are nothing without her sweet whiteness, for him to love and to follow until the end of time. For what good is the night for one without a beloved, a midnight garden without the intoxicating fragrance of jasmine?_

He withdraws from her mind as quickly as he'd entered it. Yassamin staggers, thinks she will be sick; it's as if she had, for that brief moment, felt _full_ for the first time in her life, as if she had been poured full of the water of life.

Yet now, now that Jaffar is standing apart from her, outside of her once again, it is as if she has become empty, bereft, a dried well. 

She takes three steps forwards, and she is before the throne, Jaffar taking her hand in his: as she turns to sit down upon the throne, she sees Jaffar's tears falling upon the seat just before her thighs meet it. 

As she sits down, Jaffar is seated beside her already: his hand warm and gentle and firm, the blue of his eyes again pouring into that dry well within her, filling her, exhilarating her, she overflowing, overflowing with joy--

Her mother reaches out to kiss both of her cheeks, kissing away her tears; her father pressing Jaffar's free hand, both of them murmuring benedictions.

Again, the air shimmers as if the sprites of air were tossing myriad-coloured petals, gems, pearls, the air sparkling crystalline, bright: the throne vanishes, and Jaffar and Yassamin with it.

She looks around herself, at the empty throne-room they now sit in, all as quiet as a catacomb; her heart leaps into her throat.

"Baghdad," he tells her, a finger upon her lips, for she had been ready to scream; "I have bent time a little, created a little fold in it, if you will: your parents will have us back in what seems to them but a blink of an eye. It is only..."

"Let me go!" she says, barely audibly, but cannot move: it is as if her robe has been nailed to the seat.

"Do not fear me so," he says, taking his finger from her lips and using it to lift her chin instead. "I will not have your virtue, if that's what you think."

She searches his eyes; the calmness in them is strange, indeed bizarre--and infuriating. "What, then? Why did you bring me here?"

"To let you make your choice yourself, to give you time to listen to your heart without the din of your family and duty and all those other things shouting over it," he says, smirking. "I would not steal you away--" 

"Then what do you call this?" she laughs a little hysterically, taking in the magic throne, the gilded, honeycombed ceiling. "A sorcerer's interpretation of banditry, a witch's idea of a ravishment?"

"You _are_ keen on the idea of ravishment," he chuckles, mirth dancing in his eyes. "But I mean it--I am an old man, Yassamin. I have known the sorrows of forced marriages. But now that I am Caliph, and can pick my wives--the one wife, in fact, for I haven't the strength for more than one!--I would offer her the same courtesy. Even if the stars and the marks upon your skin, as well as all I know about your intelligence and nature, tell me we are well-matched, I would know if you were of the same mind with me, Yassamin," he says and squeezes her hand. 

She is astonished at this, astonished at how much he, a man nearing fifty, still seems like a young, nervous suitor. Yet she feels humbled by his humbling of himself in this manner: again, she thinks of all the things her father had told her about Jaffar son of Yahya, thinks of all the legends she has heard of the Barmakids' kindness, thinks of all the brutal, mad warrior princes who'd been courting her in the past. There's none of their brashness to this man: he seems more philosopher than warrior. And the things he has just shown her--the facts of his magical skills and his nobility--speak for themselves. Princesses have been married to princes for reasons far poorer, flimsier; love having nothing to do with it. 

"What I mean to ask, my dear Yassamin," and now his voice wavers, sounding like a cat's; "do you think you could see yourself loving me?" And then, in her mind, his voice having failed him: _For I can, indeed, see myself loving you._

She laughs nervously, the birthmark upon her scalp burning hot and cold again; she squeezes his hand. Looking into his eyes, she takes his other hand to the back of her head, and oh, how his cheeks flutter at that; how his lip trembles!

"It is written," she says, gazing into his eyes, drinking deep from them, her heart bursting into bloom like a thousand jasmines flowering: "I was born in love with you, yet did not know it until now," she says, and it's as if something ancient now speaks from her, through her, from beyond time itself. "Can you ever forgive me?"

"Oh," he laughs, a boy's laugh, a pard's purr; "oh, my sweet Yassamin, I have already forgiven you."

And it is then that the blue of his eyes moves closer, expanding just as the blueness in her overflows once more: as he takes her mouth with his, they become the one blue heaven, one nighttime garden with the moon and the jasmine, he the sun sinking joyous into the embrace of her sea.


End file.
